Pages

Sunday, April 29, 2012

President's proposed budget (solid line) and proposed Congressional changes (dashed and dotted lines) for programs in NASA's planetary science budget that would fund development of new missions in this coming decade. Sources: President's budget proposal, proposed House bill, and news accounts for Senate version.

In several posts this year, I’ve discussed the impact of the proposed
cuts in the spending for future planetary missions in the proposed Presidential
budget. (See this post for an overall summary.) This year the Congressional
budgeting process is moving forward on schedule and we have Congress’evolving take on
the Fiscal Year 2013 budget.

To briefly recap the President’s proposed budget for planetary
exploration, the budget for Mars exploration would be cut by $226M in FY13
compared to FY12. Mars exploration budgets
would continue to drop through FY15 to support peak funding for the New
Frontiers OSIRIS-Rex asteroid sample return mission and a Discovery mission to
be selected this summer. Then funding
for the New Frontiers and Discovery programs would drop dramatically to support
a re-invigorated Mars program, call the Mars Next Decade, but one that would
not include Mars sample return as a goal.

There were several major fall outs from this proposed budget:

NASA withdrew from joint missions with the European Space Agency to
Mars in 2016 and 2018.(ESA has since
replaced NASA with Russia as a partner for these missions.)

The top priority for Flagship missions in the Decadal Survey, Mars
sample return, was dropped as a goal

No Flagship-scale missions (>$1B) are now planned to be started to
any solar system destination this decade

The pace of New Frontiers and Discovery missions would be cut well
below the goals set by the Decadal Survey.(For example, the Survey called for starting five Discovery missions
this decade; the proposed budgets by my back-of-the-envelop calculations would
support starting 2-3 Discovery missions.)

The Mars Next Decade program to jointly further the scientific exploration of
Mars and to develop technology for exploring Mars was proposed with a first
mission, goals to be defined, planned for 2018

As I and many of news sources and blogs have reported, the proposed
budget was not well received by either the planetary science community or by
Congress.

The committees in both the House of Representatives and the Senate
responsible for NASA’s budget have drafted their spending bills and the news
for planetary exploration is good. (NASA’s
overall budget would still drop and other NASA programs would receive cuts compared
to the President’s budget. See SpaceNewsfor a good summary of the overall NASA budget picture resulting from the Congressional proposals.) The Senate bill would restore $100M to the
Mars exploration program to be spent on future Mars missions. The House bill would restore $200M, with
$115M going to the New Frontiers and Discovery programs to enable a faster pace
of missions and $88M going to a future Flagship mission. (The remainder of the House increase would go to
support research programs in FY13). The
House bill would direct NASA to spend the Flagship money either on a mission
leading to a Mars sample return or on a Europa orbiter (the Decadal Survey’s
number two priority for a Flagship mission). The funding available for a Mars sample return money or a Europa orbiter would be $150M, which includes funds the President included for the Mars Next Decade program. This would
be a down payment with significant funding needed in future years to actually
build a Flagship scale mission.

At some point this summer, Congress is supposed to reconcile the House
and Senate versions of the bill and send the resulting compromise to the
President for his approval. Campaigning
for this fall’s election may delay the final bill and Congress may end up passing an omnibus bill that just funds large numbers of agencies at a
percentage of the previous year’s spending. A final spending level closer to the House version would clearly be better for
future planetary exploration.

If a version closer to the House bill is the eventual approved budget for
NASA, it will be interesting to see how NASA’s managers choose to spend
it. You cannot, for example, take the
budget for a $1.5B Flagship mission and just divide it by four to fund it over
four years, which is a typical time to develop a new mission. Rather, spending is low in
the first years as the design work is done and peaks in the last year or two before launch as
hardware is actually built and tested. Spending then continues after launch to support mission operations. In planning to use any restored budget, NASA’s managers will have to
select and schedule the development of missions to fit in peak spending. You can see this at work in the chart above as
spending for Mars is traded for spending on New Frontiers and Discovery
missions and vice versa.

The full language of the House bill pertaining to planetary exploration has been posted at SpaceRef.com; I encourage you to read it (it's about a page long) if you would like more detail. I'll close with a quote of the first paragraph:

“Planetary science has long been one of NASA's
most successful programs, and the cuts proposed in the budget request will
endanger this strong record and deviate significantly from the program plan
envisioned by the most recent planetary science decadal survey. The Committee's
recommendation of $1,400,000,000 [$200M above the President’s request] seeks to
address programmatic areas where the Administration's proposal is most
deficient in meeting the decadal survey's goals while also ensuring that the
program, as a whole, maintains balance among program elements."

Thursday, April 26, 2012

By now, you have probably read about the plans – perhaps ‘ideas’ might would
be a better word at this point – of the Planetary Resources company to mine
near Earth asteroids. Backed by several
billionaires, the company has deep financial resources and has hired engineers
and managers experienced in planetary exploration.

In many ways, the ideas of Planetary Resources managers echo those of
the companies formed to find riches in the early era of European
expansion. Private enterprise financed
by the wealthy formed the British East India Company and the Virginia Company
that backed the Jamestown colony. Like
the financers of Planetary Resources, they used their existing fortunes to
build on technology and exploration financed initially by governments. (See, for example, Prince Henry the Navigator
and the voyages of Vasco da Gama and Columbus.)

Various news outlets have good accounts of the company’s long term
plans to find mineral rich near Earth asteroids and mine their resources. To very briefly summarize their plans, they
will first mine the volatiles like water that are essential for extending
manned exploration and exploitation of the solar system beyond low Earth
orbit. Then the company will move to
mining rare and expensive minerals such as platinum that are essential to high
technology products. I don’t have any particular expertise in
mining, especially on remote, airless orbs, and I recommend their articles for analysis
of the long term economic possibilities and risks. Also, I’ve seen no details on how Planetary
Resources plans to actually conduct asteroid mining and return materials, and
in the absence of information, all commentary would have to be based on
speculation. (For more information, see: Wired Science, New York Times, and Space News.)

A series of LEO (low Earth orbit) telescopes will be launched in the
next several years.The company will use
them to analyze the composition of near Earth asteroids, presumably through
spectral analysis of the light reflected from the asteroid surfaces.The telescopes also will be available for
hire either for scientific research of space bodies or for imaging the Earth’s
surface.The company states, that “Leo is
capable of surveying for near-Earth asteroids during one orbit, then be
retasked for rain forest observation on the next. The possibilities for utility
and engagement are only limited by the imagination of the user.”According to the Bad Astronomer blog at
Discover Magazine, these will be tiny spacecraft with 22 (9”) aperture
telescopes on spacecraft that measure 40 x 40 cm (16”).

The second class of spacecraft, called Interceptors, will be based on
the LEO telescope design, but will have, augmented propulsion systems and instrument
compliments.The name implies craft that
will flyby near Earth asteroids for a brief but close up look.Their description suggests, however, that the
interception may only occur for asteroids that fly within or near the space of
the Earth-moon system.

The Rendezvous Prospector craft will have further augmented
capabilities beyond those of the Interceptors that will allow them to fly to
and orbit near Earth asteroids to study their shape, rotation, and
composition.The brief description
discusses the use of multiple Prospector spacecraft to distribute risk.It’s not clear whether the multiple craft
would fly to a single asteroid or to different asteroids.Given the small size of the LEO telescopes
from which the Prospectors will be derived, perhaps each spacecraft will carry
a single instrument and a swarm would be needed for a complete measurement of
an asteroid’s vital statistics.

The managers at Planetary Resources have released no details that I've found
on the specific capabilities and technologies of their unmanned
spacecraft. Their website simply says, “While
much of Planetary Resources’ technology is proprietary, our technological
approach is driven by a few simple principles to enable innovation in cost. We
are incorporating recent innovations in commercial microelectronics, medical
devices, and information technology, in ways not traditionally used by robotic
spacecraft.”

The website and media accounts do not discuss whether Planetary
Resources will make the data from its spacecraft available to the scientific
community. Its managers may decide, as
oil companies do with their geological surveys, that such information is
proprietary. Or not.

Editorial Thoughts: We are now into the sixth decade of the space
era. The knowledge and tools to design,
test, and build spacecraft have progressed to the point where new private
companies can design capable spacecraft.
By new, I mean companies that aren’t part of the traditional
government-aerospace industry network that have jointly designed and flown
spacecraft since the earliest launches.
Rather I mean companies like Orbital Sciences and Space X that have
designed launch vehicles, satellites, and are now working on manned spacecraft. I find it credible that Planetary Resources
could muster the resources to design and fly their unmanned spacecraft and may
introduce some clever new ideas. By
using new approaches, keeping their spacecraft tiny and their instrument compliments small, and accepting higher risks
of failure, they may do so much more cheaply than the traditional government
space agencies and their established industrial partners.

What is less certain is whether or not there will be sufficient numbers
of non-government customers to make the unmanned spacecraft a viable business
that doesn’t ultimately depend on taxpayer support. Nor is it clear that governments will want to
spend significant funds to support the short and intermediate term scientific
capabilities that Planetary Resources has proposed. Ideas to flyby and orbit near Earth asteroids
for scientific research have been proposed many times. However, the scientific goals for near Earth
asteroid missions have progressed beyond simple rendezvous and remote sensing
to returning samples of these asteroids to Earth. Both Japan and the United States have
approved sample return missions in development (the second such mission for
Japan), and the Europeans are considering a sample return mission. To be fair, it’s not possible to determine
from the information that Planetary Resources has released how much they are
depending on selling their services versus funding them through their
investors.

If I were to bet, I think that the financial backers of Planetary Resources will choose to make the data they collect on near Earth asteroids publicly available. The time frame for making a substantial profit is long, and the financiers may be more interested in enabling human expansion into the solar system rather than achieving greater wealth for themselves.

On the long term goal of asteroid mining, it is exciting, but I am
skeptical about success in the next few decades. Much technology and experience has to be
gained and financed. The availability of
volatiles mined from asteroids depends on an active space program reaching
beyond low Earth orbit. More efficient
use and reuse of rare metals on Earth offers another alternative to dealing
with shortages. In the end, it hard to
tell when and who will ultimately make the idea successful. Great wealth did come from opening up trade
routes between Europe and Asia and taking over the resources of the
Americas. However, the companies that
initially financed these ventures had a poor record of success. Look up the reason that Scotland had to give
up its independence and become a partner in a new United Kingdom with England.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

In addition to my previous post this morning with two pieces of good news, we now have a third. A House appropriations subcommittee has marked up NASA's budget, and recommended restoring $200M more than the President recommended, or $100M more than the Senate subcommittee, to NASA's planetary science program. (This would still be a $100M cut from this year's funding.) The House language specifically directs $150M of that towards a mission that leads to a Mars sample return or, if that's not possible, then the money would go towards an Europa orbiter.

Here is the post from this morning with the other good news, for your convenience:

Click on the image to read a current summary of the proposed JUICE mission

Jonathan Amos at the BBC website reports that the JUICE Jupiter system mission is now the front runner for the European Space Agency's selection of its next large science mission. If the recommendation by the Space Science Advisory Committee is ratified in a few weeks by the Space Programme Committee, JUICE would launch in 2022 and arrive at Jupiter in 2030. The spacecraft then would study the giant planet and its magnetosphere as well as conduct flybys of the moons Europa and Callisto before entering orbit around Ganymede for extensive studies of that moon. Click on the image above (or here) to read the most recent summary of the mission from the proposal team, or you can read a summary of the mission goals in an earlier post of mine, JUICE – Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter Revised Proposal. There is the possibility that NASA may play a minor role in the mission such as contributing an instrument or two.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. Senate's Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee voted to restore $100M of the proposed cuts to NASA's Mars program. This would still leave NASA's planetary science program with a cut compared to last year of approximately $200M. It's unclear how NASA would use the additional funding if it is matched in the House budget and eventually signed into law by the President. The additional funds would be too late and too small to allow NASA to rejoin the European and Russian 2016 mission and probably the 2018 mission. Possibilities I can think of is that NASA might contribute entry, landing, and descent technology for the 2018 rover in exchange to being allowed to contribute instruments, or the funding to enhance the scope of NASA's own planned 2018 Mars mission, or the funding might be used to enable more frequent flights of Discovery or New Frontiers missions.

I'll close by posting two slides from the recent JUICE mission summary that describe the contributions the mission would make to studying Ganymede and Europa. I recommend you read the full presentation.

Click on the image to read a current summary of the proposed JUICE mission

Jonathan Amos at the BBC website reports that the JUICE Jupiter system mission is now the front runner for the European Space Agency's selection of its next large science mission. If the recommendation by the Space Science Advisory Committee is ratified in a few weeks by the Space Programme Committee, JUICE would launch in 2022 and arrive at Jupiter in 2030. The spacecraft then would study the giant planet and its magnetosphere as well as conduct flybys of the moons Europa and Callisto before entering orbit around Ganymede for extensive studies of that moon. Click on the image above (or here) to read the most recent summary of the mission from the proposal team, or you can read a summary of the mission goals in an earlier post of mine, JUICE – Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter Revised Proposal. There is the possibility that NASA may play a minor role in the mission such as contributing an instrument or two.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. Senate's Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee voted to restore $100M of the proposed cuts to NASA's Mars program. This would still leave NASA's planetary science program with a cut compared to last year of approximately $200M. It's unclear how NASA would use the additional funding if it is matched in the House budget and eventually signed into law by the President. The additional funds would be too late and too small to allow NASA to rejoin the European and Russian 2016 mission and probably the 2018 mission. Possibilities I can think of is that NASA might contribute entry, landing, and descent technology for the 2018 rover in exchange to being allowed to contribute instruments, or the funding to enhance the scope of NASA's own planned 2018 Mars mission, or the funding might be used to enable more frequent flights of Discovery or New Frontiers missions.

I'll close by posting two slides from the recent JUICE mission summary that describe the contributions the mission would make to studying Ganymede and Europa. I recommend you read the full presentation.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Website for conference for which NASA is soliciting ideas for its new Mars roadmap

You may have read by now that this past Friday, NASA held a press
conference to discuss its planning process to develop a new strategy to explore
Mars. This follows the budget cuts to
NASA’s Mars exploration plans requested in the President’s Fiscal Year 2013
budget. NASA has announced in response
to those cuts that it would plan for a modest $700M Mars mission in 2018 and
future missions that would both further both Mars science and develop
technologies for eventual manned missions to Mars. No details other than the budget have been
released for the 2018 mission. You can
read NASA’s press release on the conference here.

This was an unusual press conference that presented the plan for the
plan but carefully did not discuss any of the ideas under consideration for
specific missions, especially the planned 2018 mission. What NASA managers did was to reiterate NASA’s
plans to develop a new plan and to announce a workshop to be held this June to
solicit ideas that “will provide an open forum for presentation, discussion and
consideration of concepts, options, capabilities and innovations to advance
Mars exploration. These ideas will inform a strategy for exploration within available
resources, beginning as early as 2018 and stretching into the next decade and
beyond.”

Instrumentation and Investigation Approaches (for example, “Interrogating
the shallow subsurface of Mars, both from orbit (remote sensing, active, or
passive) and from the surface (e.g., sounding, drilling, excavating,
penetrators, or other approaches)”

Safe and Accurate Landing Capabilities, Mars Ascent, and Innovative
Exploration Approaches (for example, “Concepts to navigate and control
entry and landing systems to improve landing accuracy from the current state of
the art (~10-km semi-major axis or “miss distance”) to ≤1 km or lower
(<100 m).)”

The focus of the workshop is on ideas for developing a technology roadmap,
not for laying out specific options for the 2018 mission or for identifying
scientific priorities, which will be taken from the recently completed Decadal
Survey.

The ideas presented at the workshop will be used by a NASA taskforce, the
Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) headed by Orlando Figueroa, which will
recommend a new Mars strategy and the goals of the 2018 mission in a report to
be delivered this August.

Editorial Thoughts: The list of topics for the workshop seems to
emphasize the importance of the new Mars program in developing technologies to
further robotic exploration of Mars and to eventually enable manned
exploration. The science goals for the
missions will be taken from last year’s Decadal Survey report, which emphasized
that other than missions leading to an eventual Mars sample return, no Mars
science was a higher priority than science for other bodies in the solar
system. (The report’s authors did make
an exception by explicitly including Mars within the list of candidate targets
for the low cost Discovery program.)

It will be interesting to see how NASA will reconcile a Mars program
that does not include sample return with the goals of the Decadal Survey. Two other analyses of this press conference
suggest that the task may be difficult.
Lou Friedman wrote at the Planetary Society website that, “One of the
big concerns now in the science community is how the new program plans will
meet Planetary Decadal recommendations.”
Marcia Smith at Space Policy Online.com wrote, “Convincing the planetary
science community and its supporters that another Mars mission is more
important than other planetary exploration missions waiting their turn may be a
challenging task, and whether it advances President Obama's goals for human
exploration beyond low Earth orbit -- which starts with a human mission to
an asteroid, not to Mars -- is an open question.”

I believe that NASA’s managers are doing their best to respond to a bad
situation not of their making (the proposed budget cuts) by creatively merging
the goals and available funding of the human spaceflight programs. The comments quoted above indicate some of the
challenges they face. The scientific
community will present its collective response to the eventual plan through its scientific societies
and NASA’s advisory and analysis groups.
The ultimate practical measure of how well NASA succeeds may be whether
Congress, ends up supporting this new direction in the ultimate budget approved
for FY13 and whether the President proposes the necessary funding to move
forward in his FY14 budget.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

If you are an American citizen, you can help save NASA’s
planetary science program by writing your Congressman and Senators along with the
chairs the key committees. (For
background, see this post and this post.)

Both the American Geophysical Union and the PlanetarySociety have background and the latter has a tool to send your email. (Email is now the best way to communicate;
physical letters must be irradiated before delivery after the anthrax
attacks several years ago.) In addition to your own
representatives, copy the key chairs: Representative Ralph Hall (R-TX), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee (enter the zip code 75087 at this website for the email to go to him, but make it clear that the email is
a copy http://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml)
and Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) chairwoman of of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science (http://www.mikulski.senate.gov/contact/shareyouropinion.cfm).

An article in the Los Angeles Times helps to make clear what
is at stake: “Scientists are concerned about a significant
"brain drain" at JPL in coming years if the La Cañada Flintridge
lab's planetary missions are curtailed, particularly among its sterling roster
of Mars specialists. 'The
skill base to enter the Martian atmosphere, descend to the surface and land
softly is a pretty unique skill,' said Richard O'Toole, executive manager
of JPL's Office of Legislative Affairs.”

If the key scientists and engineers needed to plan, design, build, test,
and operate planetary missions leave JPL, John Hopkin’s Applied Physics
Laboratory, and other key centers, it will take years to rebuild the expertise when
the budget picture eventually improves.

Can writing actually help? I remember the last time that the planetary science program was facing major cuts. I wrote my letters (physical letters, then). Later I remember reading a Congressional staffer saying they had been overwhelmed by the number of letters they received supporting the program. The actual number escapes me, but I remember being shocked at how few it was, dozens I think. The cuts planned, including cancelling the Galileo mission to the Jupiter system were partially reversed. Imagine what hundreds of emails could do today.

Updates

This week, the European Space Agency’s Space Science
Advisory Committee (SSAC) will decide which of the three proposed large science
missions to recommend to ESA’s management for approval. In contention against two solid competitors
is the JUICE mission to Jupiter and the Galilean moons. While the official decision will not be made
until late this Spring, the BBC’s Jonathan Amos writes that word likely will leak
out on the recommendation soon.

I previously wrote about the Senior Review that is
considering which NASA spacecraft in extended missions should continue to
receive funding and at what levels.
While the results for planetary missions like Cassini won’t be known for several
months, the results for astrophysics missions are known. All missions, including the Kepler exoplanet
hunting mission, have been recommended for continued funding. In the latter case, funding is recommended
through 2016. This will significantly
enhance the mission’s ability to find Earth-like worlds potentially capable of
hosting life. You can read more about
the recommendations at Universe Today.

About Me

You can contact me at futureplanets1@gmail.com with any questions or comments.
I have followed planetary exploration since I opened my newspaper in 1976 and saw the first photo from the surface of Mars. The challenges of conceiving and designing planetary missions has always fascinated me. I don't have any formal tie to NASA or planetary exploration (although I use data from NASA's Earth science missions in my professional work as an ecologist).
Corrections and additions always welcome.